


Bread Wouldn't Rise Otherwise

by GretchenSinister



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-10
Updated: 2019-06-10
Packaged: 2020-04-24 08:48:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19169827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister
Summary: Original Prompt: "I’d like to see something that shows Jack’s sister’s grieving process, with a happy ending. The script says she’s about 4 at the time and that would be quite the trauma, but she has the rest of her life to go through. I’d guess it would be rather short since 40 was “old age” back then but, still.Be creative, take liberties! I just need something that isn’t her being absolutely nothing but a void of angst post-Jack death."Emma moves on, as people do, and everything does. She’s an adult here, thinking about what Jack’s death meant more than just itself.





	Bread Wouldn't Rise Otherwise

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr on 1/4/2016.

_Jack isn’t coming back._  
  
Emma shakes her head at herself as she kneads the bread dough. It’s such a tidy phrase, isn’t it? Rhymes at the ends, and the middle with just two pairs of syllables with matching rhythms. It’s almost like poetry, and that’s what keeps the phrase itself coming back, she supposes. What her mother had said to her that late winter day, after Jack had fallen, and she had run for help, and her mother had run for more help, and some men of the town had come with ropes and pitchforks and anything with a long handle that might help get Jack out of the cold lake without anyone else being lost as well.  
  
It seemed like they worked forever, that day.  
  
Emma remembers her mother screaming at the men who came to help when they started moving slower, lifting her skirts to her knees and heading to the water herself. That was when Emma had really cried, and Thomas the blacksmith, who was father to her friend Prudence, had reached out and guided her mother away from the lakeshore. That was before Prudence’s mother Elizabeth had died of a fever, and before Prudence had become Emma’s sister.  
  
That was before a long string of deaths, really, if you wanted to see things that way. But the village is still here, and so it had to be just as fair to say that was before a long string of lives, too. She’s making bread to feed a pair that came from her, that was true enough. But Jack was the first person who had died who she had known. And how her mother had told her just had such a sticking sound to it.  
  
And so even if Jack didn’t come back, thoughts of his death always would, especially when the year began to turn cold.  
  
She misses him, naturally, but in a different way than she misses others she’s lost. She misses him because it’s as if him being alive would be the same thing as not knowing about death. And that’s not true. She knows that if Jack had lived, it wouldn’t mean anything about who else might have died, and when. She would have still learned. Almost every bed in the village became someone’s deathbed, sometime.  
  
So, maybe, when she thinks of Jack not coming back, when she thinks of Jack, it’s not really his death and him that she’s thinking of. After all, she had been such a little child, then, and children are such selfish little creatures.  
  
Jack had broken through the ice, and death had broken into Emma’s awareness. So Jack was her childhood without death, and when she misses him, she misses that. She misses a time that she can’t help but feel should have been longer.  
  
But it wouldn’t have been much longer, anyway, would it? She had been of an age to start noticing more and more about the world, and death was part of it. The lesson Jack’s death taught her couldn’t have been avoided forever.  
  
And so she misses him, though she hadn’t  _really_  known him, not understood him like she had learned to understand others—she had been so young. And she misses herself, and she misses not knowing that death is always there.  
  
But the time after taught her other things, too. That while death is always there, so is life. And if life seemed just as cruel as the water rushing over Jack when it rushed to fill in the spaces left by death, well, maybe it was. But maybe they were neither of them so very cruel after all. They just were themselves, as they had to be.  
  
Jack isn’t coming back. And neither is child Emma. But life always has more in store, whether good or bad, and it’s always enough. More often than not, it’s enough to make it seem like there might not be room enough for any of the old things, anymore.  
  
She shapes the dough into a loaf. And that’s a good thought, isn’t it? That everything keeps moving forward, living and dying? The bread wouldn’t rise if it wasn’t true. And that was that. 


End file.
